You guys paint me as some weird dude in your head. I'm just a normal guy who loves Jesus. I don't want to force God on anyone or mandate Him politically. If God wanted to make us all love Him, He would have created us all as robots in the first place. He wouldn't have made us as humans with free will. If you think about it, love isn't even possible if we don't have freewill to love or hate. That is why religions like Islam can never be truth because the convert by the sword.

Love or hate are not simplistic choices one makes.

"That is why religions like Islam can never be truth because the convert by the sword"

He says ignoring the history of Christianity up until the last couple hundred years.

Christianity in medieval times was screwed up. Christianity before that time was pretty revolutionary (hence the reason it spread like wildfire), and after the medieval time. It only gained traction again when the bible was translated from Latin. Look it up moosy.

^Actually there was infighting from the very beginning, even among the earliest gnostic communes. There is some evidence that evangelists like Paul and his followers eradicated other sects and that the Nag Hammadi cache was not being hidden from the Romans, but from other Christian groups.

Pagans were routinely persecuted and eradicated as the Word spread north into Europe, with few left to write their side of the story. It is believed that hundreds of thousands of pagans died at the hands of Charlemagne's forces, who leveled not only their villages and shrines but whole forests and sacred groves in their campaigns. Then there's the atrocities and pogroms of the Crusades, followed by those of the Inquisition. The Reformation saw multiple Christian faiths jockeying for power with varying levels of brutality, the Church of England being just one of the more well known in the English speaking world for sanctioning the persecution of Catholics and atrocities against the Irish. (Happy St. Patty's Day!) And all the while, hundreds of thousands of dissident voices, homosexuals, 'uppity women', Jews, and any 'others' outside the favor of whichever group of Christians were in power at any given moment were burned, hung, drowned or tortured to death as witches and heretics. Even animals were occasionally tried and tortured to death, like the sow of Savigny, a mature mother pig hung upside down until dead after it had defended its children from a boy that was tormenting them in 1457. Wolves were routinely tortured to death in Christian rituals, and there is at least one known case of a horse being crucified upside down as possessed after it accidentally threw its owner who died.

In New World and Asian colonies, non Christians were often enslaved and worked to death. Jesuits helped cut a swath through the human population of the Americas north and south with the Word and contagion they carried with them. And contrary to Thanksgiving mythology, the Pilgrims were no friends to the indigenous population who were deemed subhuman even when they became Christians. And as slaves were brought from Africa by Christian slavers, hundreds of thousands were baptized by their evangelical Christian masters yet still raped, tortured, murdered, and worked to death indiscriminately by them.

So yeah, Jesus seems like he might have been a genuinely nice, educated, liberal rabbi who attempted to deconstruct some of the Old Testament's severity, but make no mistake, he has absolutely nothing to do with with the shitshow that came after him. To paraphrase Freddy N., 'The last Christian died on the cross.'

You guys paint me as some weird dude in your head. I'm just a normal guy who loves Jesus. I don't want to force God on anyone or mandate Him politically. If God wanted to make us all love Him, He would have created us all as robots in the first place. He wouldn't have made us as humans with free will. If you think about it, love isn't even possible if we don't have freewill to love or hate. That is why religions like Islam can never be truth because the convert by the sword.

Love or hate are not simplistic choices one makes.

"That is why religions like Islam can never be truth because the convert by the sword"

He says ignoring the history of Christianity up until the last couple hundred years.

Christianity in medieval times was screwed up. Christianity before that time was pretty revolutionary (hence the reason it spread like wildfire), and after the medieval time. It only gained traction again when the bible was translated from Latin. Look it up moosy.

I already know shit like this, Matt. Thats because unlike you I actually pay attention to history. Christianity even before that was pretty screwed up in a lot of ways and still is.

Also, Matt, I really love when you try to lecture me about things as if I automatically have absolutely no clue about it despite actually having been a christian, actually being decently educated, and actually loving to learn new shit all the freaking time.